In a Nutshell With our busy schedules
it might be difficult to find time to think about who we are, our strengths
and weaknesses, our drives and personalities, our habits and values.
Besides, many of us just aren't inclined to spend much time on self-reflection.
Even when personal feedback is presented to us, we're not always open to
it, because honest feedback isn't always flattering.
Consequently, many of us have a pretty low level of self-awareness.
That's unfortunate, because self-awareness
is an essential first step toward maximizing
management skills. Self-awareness
can improve our judgment and help us identify opportunities for professional
development and personal growth.

Did Messier Have CEO Disease? Earlier this month, Jean-Rene
Fourtou (see photo above) was announced as the new Chairman and CEO of
Vivendi Universal. He replaced Jean-Marie Messier, who was ousted
in a boardroom coup. Criticisms of Messier included his aggressive
acquisition strategy that made a French water and sewer company into a
media conglomerate, and also his flamboyant style and personal excesses.1
Let's see ... sewage and movies ... are there any synergies?
Could Messier have suffered
from what Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee refer to as "CEO disease" in their
best-selling book,
Primal Leadership? They describe CEO disease
as "the information vacuum around a leader created when people withhold
important (and usually unpleasant) information."2 Vivendi
executives might have found it difficult to tell Messier that his excesses
were leading the firm to a downfall.
Just as being able to see
your reflection in the mirror helps you to fix your hair, feedback on your
characteristics and behaviors helps you to develop your management skills
and improve your judgment. Self-awareness--i.e., knowing your personal
characteristics and how your actions affect other people, business results,
etc.--is an essential first step toward maximizing your management skills.

Key Areas for Self-Awareness Human beings are complex
and diverse. To become more self-aware, we should develop an understanding
of ourselves in many areas. Key areas for self-awareness include
our personality traits, personal values, habits, emotions, and the psychological
needs that drive our behaviors.
Personality.
We don't normally change our personalities, values and needs based on what
we learn about ourselves. But, an understanding of our personalities
can help us find situations in which we will thrive, and help us avoid
situations in which we will experience too much stress. For instance,
if you are a highly introverted person, you are likely to experience more
stress in a sales position than a highly extroverted person would.
So, if you are highly introverted, you should either learn skills to cope
with the demands of a sales position that requires extravert-type behavior
patterns, or you should find a position that is more compatible with your
personality. Awareness of your personality helps you analyze such
a decision.
Values.
It's important that we each know and focus on our personal
values. For instance, if your first priority is "being there
for your children" or "your relationship with God," it's very easy to lose
sight of those priorities on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis.
During the workday, so many problems and opportunities arise that our lists
of "things to do" can easily exceed the time we have to do them.
Since few (if any) of those things pertain to what we value most, it's
easy to spend too much time on lower priority activities. When we
focus on our values, we are more likely to accomplish what we consider
most important.
Habits.
Our habits are the behaviors that we repeat routinely and often automatically.
Although we would like to possess the habits that help us interact effectively
with and manage others, we can probably all identify at least one of our
habits that decreases our effectiveness. For example, if you are
a manager who never consults your staff before making decisions, that habit
may interfere with your ability to build your staff members' commitment
to the decisions and their decision-making skills as well.
Needs.
Maslow and other scholars have identified a variety of psychological needs
that drive our behaviors such as needs for esteem, affection, belongingness,
achievement, self-actualization, power and control. One of the advantages
of knowing which needs exert the strongest influence on our own behaviors
is the ability to understand how they affect our interpersonal relationships.
For instance, most of us have probably known people who have a high need
for status. They're attracted to high status occupations, and they
seek high status positions within their organizations. Such people
also want the things that symbolize their status. They insist that
they be shown respect, and they want privileges and perks that people of
lower status can't have. Sometimes these people fight for things
that others see as inconsequential--like a bigger office. (This month,
a senior colleague is taking my office and sending me to a lesser office!)
Needs cause motivation; and when they aren't satisfied, needs can cause
frustration, conflict and stress.
Emotions.
Emotional self-awareness has become a hot topic of discussion recently
because it's one of the five facets of emotional intelligence. Understanding
your own feelings, what causes them, and how they impact your thoughts
and actions is emotional self-awareness. If you were once excited
about your job but not excited now, can you get excited again? To
answer that question, it helps to understand the internal processes associated
with getting excited. That sounds simpler than it is. Here's
an analogy: I think I know how my car starts--I put gas in the tank, put
the key in the ignition, and turn the key. But, my mechanic knows
a lot more about what's involved in getting my car started than I do--he
knows what happens under the hood. My mechanic is able to start my
car on the occasions when I'm not because he understands the internal processes.
Similarly, a person with high emotional self-awareness understands the
internal process associated with emotional experiences and, therefore,
has greater control over them.

How Self-Awareness
Makes You More EffectiveSkill
development. Improvement projects should normally begin
with an assessment of the gap between the current situation and the desired
future situation. Having an accurate sense of who you are helps you
decide what you should do to improve. Often, self-awareness will
reveal a skills gap that you want to work on.
Knowing
your strengths and weaknesses. Self-awareness helps you
exploit your strengths and cope with your weaknesses. For instance,
if you are someone who is good at "seeing the big picture" that surrounds
decisions, but not as good at focusing on the details, you might want to
consult colleagues and subordinates that are more detail-oriented when
making major decisions. Cooperation between big-picture-oriented
decision makers and detail-oriented decision makers can produce high quality
decisions.
Developing
intuitive decision-making skills. Leaders with well-developed
emotional self-awareness are more effective intuitive decision makers.
In complex situations, intuitive decision makers process large amounts
of sometimes unstructured and ambiguous data, and they choose a course
of action based on a "gut feeling" or a "sense" of what's best. This
type of decision making is becoming more important for managers as the
rate of change and the levels of uncertainty and complexity in their competitive
environments increase. Managers who are highly emotionally self-aware
are better able to read their "gut feelings" and use them to guide decisions.
Stress.
Jobs that don't suit your personality tend to give you more stress than
jobs that are more compatible. This is not to say that you should
never take a job that conflicts with your personality. However, be
aware that you will need to work extra hard to develop the skills for that
job, and there are jobs that would be less stressful for you.
Motivation.
It's very difficult to cope with poor results when you don't understand
what causes them. When you don't know what behaviors to change to
improve your performance, you just feel helpless. Self-awareness
is empowering because it can reveal where the performance problems are
and indicate what can be done to improve performance. In addition,
awareness of your psychological needs can increase your motivation by helping
you understand and seek out the rewards that you really desire such as
a sense of accomplishment, additional responsibility, an opportunity to
help others, or a flexible work schedule.
Leadership.
When we understand "what make us tick"--what gets us excited, why we behave
the way we do, etc.--we also have insight into what makes others tick.
To the extent that other people are like you (and, of course, there are
limits to the similarity), knowing how to motivate yourself is tantamount
to knowing how to motivate others.

Practicing This Management
Skill You can become more self-aware
by seeking feedback from the people who know you, completing self-assessment
surveys, and hiring an expert like a professional counselor or executive
coach.
Ask
somebody. If you have open, trusting relationships with
the people who know you, you can ask them for feedback about your personality,
habits, needs and values. Research shows that your coworkers, friends
and family members CAN provide valid assessments of your personality.
But, they do NOT ALWAYS provide an accurate assessment. For instance,
last year I asked my undergraduate students to describe my personality
on the four Myers-Briggs personality dimensions, and they described the
exact opposite of my actual personality. Their ratings described
the personality that is appropriate for a teacher, and they also rated
me as a good teacher. So, they saw me act like a teacher in my role
as a teacher, but those behaviors are not representative of my behaviors
in other roles. There are two lessons in that: (1) You can
develop skills for a role that doesn't match your personality. (2)
People who only see you in one role can only describe your behaviors in
relation to that role. Analogously, if you mismanage your time so
that you spend too much time on things that don't matter much to you, people
will have a very different perception of your values than you do.
(That sort of discrepancy can be a real "eye opener.")
Another limitation on the
value of the feedback you get from family, friends and especially coworkers
is that they may not be completely candid with you. This is where
the trust
factor looms large. Unflattering feedback is the type that has the
most potential for helping you develop your management skills, but it is
also the most difficult to give and to accept. People aren't very
likely to give you unflattering feedback if there isn't a high level of
trust in your relationship with them ... unless they don't mind harming
the relationship. For this reason, many experts (e.g., Ed Eppley,
Area Manager for Dale Carnegie Training,
and Ellen Van Velsor of the Center for Creative
Leadership) suggest that managers find a way to get anonymous feedback
from staff members and co-workers.
Questionnaires.
One of the ways to improve the quality of the feedback that you can receive
from other people is by asking them to fill out a psychometrically sound
inventory of your personality, values, needs, or habits as they perceive
them. Those surveys are composed and structured in such a way as
to maximize the accuracy of the feedback they generate. With the
help of a facilitator, the surveys can be completed anonymously.
You can also fill out surveys yourself as a means of self-assessment.
Seek
professional help. Professional counselors and executive
coaches can be a great source of feedback to help you develop your self-awareness.
Of course, not everyone who calls himself a coach is qualified. You
should evaluate the training and certifications of counselors and coaches.
Nevertheless, executive coaching is a great resource, and it's a growing
area of management consulting. Coaches not only help you get a better
picture of who you are; they also guide you through self-improvement.
Often, coaches collect anonymous evaluations of their clients from their
subordinates, superiors or anyone else who is in a position to provide
helpful feedback. Good coaches know how to effectively collect and
digest the feedback. Professional counselors, such as guidance counselors
and clinical psychologists, are also great resources. Guidance counselors
can provide inventories of your personality and interests. Clinical
psychologists can help you understand and work on aspects of your personality
and habits that interfere with any facet of your life, including work.

In Summary ... To perfect your management
skills, the best place to start is self-awareness. Self-awareness
means knowing your values, personality, needs, habits, emotions, strengths,
weaknesses, etc. With a sense of who you are and a vision of the
person you want to become, a plan for professional or personal development
can be created. Moreover, self-awareness allows you to motivate yourself
and manage your stress better, helps you with your intuitive decision making,
and helps you to lead and motivate others more effectively. Self-awareness
is very useful.

About the
Newsletter and SubscriptionsLeaderLetter is written
by Dr. Scott Williams, Department of Management, Raj
Soin College of Business, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio.
It is a supplement to my MBA 751 - Managing People in Organizations class.
It is intended to reinforce the course concepts and maintain communication
among my former MBA 751 students, but anyone is welcome to subscribe.
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E-mail Your Comments Whether you are one of my
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Let's keep the conversation going.

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